Many Va. Officials Filed Obsolete, Outdated Forms

The Buchanan County Board of Supervisors might have filed up-to-date economic disclosure forms this year if Administrative Secretary Sandy Stiltner had only used Google.
Instead, she typed “state of Virginia economic interest” into a different Internet search engine, Yahoo, and printed the first disclosure form that popped up – a form nearly eight years out of date.
The result: Buchanan’s seven supervisors filed forms that technically no longer exist.
They weren’t the only Southwest Virginia officials who filed obsolete questionnaires under a law meant to bolster the public’s confidence in open government. Nearly 80 sheriffs, commonwealth’s attorneys, county treasurers, county supervisors, and city and town council members filed financial disclosure forms that haven’t been current since a 2001 and a 2006 revamp.
The Bristol Herald Courier and News Channel 11 Connects also found obsolete forms in Bristol, Bluefield and Norton, and in Russell and Tazewell counties.
It’s possible that more officials across Virginia filed an outdated questionnaire this year. Secretary of the Commonwealth Katherine K. Hanley, who is tasked with supplying the form to local offices through her office’s Web page, is unsure if the current form was online at the time officials needed it.
Asked when the up-to-date form was posted, Hanley said: “You’ve raised an interesting question.”

Greater detail
Officials should have filed the more in-depth questionnaire that the Virginia General Assembly dropped into circulation July 1, 2008. Among the changes, the newest form asks public officials to list all of the real estate they own as well as the names of any co-owners. The obsolete forms had required officials to list only the real estate owned in the officeholder’s jurisdiction, or adjoining localities.
The difference is a form that could spell out whether a public official co-owns land somewhere else with a developer.
State Sen. Mark R. Herring, who represents Loudoun in northern Virginia, added that change after the FBI began investigating ties between Loudoun public officials and real-estate developers. The ties came to light after the Loudoun Board of Supervisors and School Board made several multimillion-dollar land grabs.
“I felt it was needed to restore people’s confidence in local government,” Herring said.
Before that, in 2006, Salem Delegate H. Morgan Griffith added a change that required officials to more specifically list the values of investments in businesses with Virginia ties.
Under previous forms, officials had to specify only if the values reached $50,000 or more.
Now, they must provide more detail, including whether those investments are between $50,000 and $250,000 each or if they exceed the later figure.
“It was absolutely made for greater transparency,” Griffith said of his changes. It also provides a more detailed picture of the value of the official’s holdings.
An example of what Griffith’s change is intended to reveal can be found in the form that Smyth County Circuit Court Judge Isaac St. Clair Freeman filed this year. He used a 2001 questionnaire, and filed three pages of investments, listing 42 individual items.
On 20 of those items, Freeman checked a box stating that he has $50,000 or more invested in that particular stock, bond or mutual fund. On the other 22, he checked a box stating that he has an investment between $10,000 and $50,000. With those numbers, his total investments could be $1.22 million or as high as $2.1 million. But they also could be much more.
If Freeman had filed the correct, newer form – those individual listings would have been sorted into three categories, including one for any securities valued at more than $250,000.

Illegal documents?
Legally, Griffith said, filing with an obsolete form could mean that Freeman and 79 other Southwest Virginia officials might have violated the law.
“The old forms no longer exist, so from a legal standpoint … you have not filled out the form,” he said.
Hanley offered a different perspective.
“There’s very little difference between the old form and the new one,” she said. “You really shouldn’t hold it against them [officials] if they filed the old one because at least they still tried.”
Local officials might have little to worry about anyway.
Virginia scrutinizes only those forms filed by state-level public officials: senators, delegates and executive branch officers. Local officials are essentially left to police themselves, which might mean no one is really watching.

The right form
Buchanan’s Stiltner complained that local government offices are left to find the questionnaire for themselves.
“It’s a simple mistake … you can get that form in so many different places,” a distraught Stiltner said when a reporter pointed out that the county’s version is outdated.
Outdated forms do pop up in various Internet search queries.
Still, Virginia’s Secretary of the Commonwealth posts the up-to-date disclosure form and the state’s disclosure law on the official Web site, http://www.commonwealth.virginia.gov/.
It’s the first site to pop up when “state of Virginia economic interest” is typed into Google.
To find it, though, Stiltner needed assistance, a reporter guiding her via telephone to the state’s Web page and a link on the home page marked “Forms.” That link opens a page with various types of forms for lobbyists, notaries, other state officials and even prisoner extradition. Under a heading of state government, displayed in bold blue letters are: “Conflict of Interest/Disclosure.”
That is the page that the clerks of local county supervisors, city and town councils, and school boards are supposed to use by Nov. 30 of each year. At the local level, it is the clerks’ job to print and dole out the disclosure form.
At the state level, it is the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth that distributes the form to higher-ranking officials.

Distribution tasks
Local clerks have until Dec. 10 to get the form into the hands of elected officials, who in turn have until Jan. 15 to return it filled out, signed and notarized. Sheriffs, commonwealth’s attorneys and other constitutional officers sometimes get the form on their own. At other times, they receive it from the clerks.
Tazewell County Commissioner of the Revenue Emma N. Hagy said her outdated form, from 2006, arrived in her e-mail from the Board of Supervisors’ clerk.
“Well, that is odd,” Hagy said after learning that her form is outdated. “You mean that I filled out something that is no good?”
In Tazewell this year, some officials filed current questionnaires while others turned in the 2006 form.
Supervisors’ clerk Ruth Groseclose, who sent the e-mail, said she was sure the same document had been sent to everyone.
“I got those [forms] off of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s page,” said Groseclose, who went on to correctly detail how to find the current forms on the Internet.
Days after a reporter pointed out the mistake, Groseclose e-mailed updated portions of the form to five officials with outdated statements.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Groseclose wrote. “When I sent the notices to you in early November 2008 the Secretary of [the] Commonwealth’s web site had not been updated.”
There is no way of verifying her argument because Secretary of the Commonwealth Hanley said there are no records for when the updated form was first posted.
“The person who did that is no longer with us,” Hanley said.
The Internet is not the root of everyone’s dilemma, however.
All six of Bluefield’s Town Council members used the 2001 form because that was the copy still lurking in the administrative office’s file cabinet, said Lesley Catron, the town clerk of two weeks.
“I was told this file was where to get it,” she said.

| (276) 791-0698